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The Birthday Party (play)

First publication(Encore Publishing, 1959)

The Birthday Party (1957) is the second full-length play by Harold Pinter. It is one of his best-known and most frequently performed plays.

In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little birthday party is turned into a nightmare on the unexpected arrival of two sinister strangers. The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.

The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London".[1][2] Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive supposedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn Stanley's apparently innocuous birthday party organised by Meg into a nightmare.[3][4]

While Meg prepares to serve her husband Petey breakfast, Stanley, described as a man "in his late thirties" (23), who is disheveled and unshaven, enters from upstairs. Alternating between maternal and flirtatious affectation toward Stanley, Meg tells him that "two gentlemen", two new "visitors", will be arriving (30–31). At this information, Stanley appears concerned, suspicious, and disbelieving; there is "A sudden knock on the front door" and Meg goes offstage, while Stanley "listens" at a voice coming "through the letter box," but it is just Lulu carrying in a package delivered for Meg. Right after Meg and Lulu exit, Goldberg and McCann arrive, but Stanley immediately "sidles through the kitchen door and out of the back door" before they can see him to eavesdrop (38), but they speak only vaguely about "this job" they have to do with bureaucratic clichés (41), nevertheless rendering McCann "satisfied" (41). After Meg's new "guests" go up to their room, Stanley enters, and Meg gives him the package brought by Lulu containing his birthday present, which he opens, revealing, inappropriately for a man his age, a toy drum.

Stanley encounters McCann and the two talk. McCann is intent on preventing Stanley from leaving the house and Stanley's behaviour and speech start to become erratic. He denies the fact that it is his birthday and insists that Meg is mad for saying so, and asks McCann if Goldberg has told him why he has been brought to the house. Goldberg enters and sends McCann out to collect some Whiskey that he has ordered for the party. When McCann returns, he and Goldberg interrogate Stanley with a series of ambiguous, rhetorical questions, tormenting him to complete collapse. Meg then enters in her party dress, Lulu arrives, and the party proceeds with a series of toasts in Stanley's honour. The party culminates with a game of blind man's buff, during which McCann further taunts Stanley by breaking his glasses and trapping his foot in the toy drum. Stanley then attacks Meg, and then in the black out that immediately follows attacks, attempts to rape Lulu. The act ends with Goldberg and McCann backing the maniacally laughing Stanley against a wall.

Paralleling the first scene of the play, Petey is having breakfast, and Meg asks him innocuous questions, with important differences revealing the aftermath of the party. After Meg leaves to do some shopping, Petey begins to express concern to Goldberg about Stanley's condition and about Goldberg's intention to take him to an unseen character called Monty. There then follows an exchange between Goldberg and McCann during which Goldberg's usual confident style temporarily abandons him, though he seems to recover after asking McCann to blow in his mouth. Lulu then confronts Goldberg about the way he treated the previous night (during unseen events that occurred after the party) but is driven from the house by McCann making unsavoury comments about her character and demanding that she confess her sins to him. McCann then brings in Stanley, with his broken glasses, and he and Goldberg bombard him with a list of his faults and of all the benefits he will obtain by submitting to their influence. When asked for his opinion of what he has to gain, Stanley is unable to answer. They begin to lead him out of the house toward the car waiting to take him to Monty. Petey confronts them one last time but passively backs down as they take Stanley away, "broken", calling out "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" (101). After Meg returns from shopping, she notices that "The car's gone" and as Petey remains silent, he continues to withhold his knowledge of Stanley's departure, allowing her to end the play without knowing the truth about Stanley.

Produced by Michael Codron and David Hall, the play had its world première at the Arts Theatre, in Cambridge, England, on 28 April 1958, where the play was "warmly received" on its pre-London tour, in Oxford and Wolverhampton, where it also met with a "positive reception" as "the most enthralling experience the Grand Theatre has given us in many months."[8][9][10]

On 19 May 1958, the production moved to the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith (now the Lyric Hammersmith),[11] for its début in London, where it was a commercial and mostly critical failure, instigating "bewildered hysteria" and closing after only eight performances.[8][9][12] The weekend after it had already closed, Harold Hobson's belated rave review, "The Screw Turns Again", appeared in The Sunday Times,[13] rescuing its critical reputation and enabling it to become one of the classics of the modern stage.[8][12][14][3][8]

The Lyric celebrated the play's 50th anniversary with a revival, directed by artistic director David Farr, and related events from 8 to 24 May 2008, including a gala performance and reception hosted by Harold Pinter on 19 May 2008, exactly fifty years after its London première.[8][12][15][16]

Like many of Pinter's other plays, very little of the expository information in The Birthday Party is verifiable; it is often contradicted by the characters and otherwise ambiguous, and, therefore, one cannot take what they say at face value. For example, in Act One, Stanley describes his career, saying "I've played the piano all over the world," reduces that immediately to "All over the country," and then, after a "pause", undercuts both hyperbolic self-representations in stating "I once gave a concert."[17]

While the title and the dialogue refer to Meg's planning a party to celebrate Stanley's birthday: "It's your birthday, Stan. I was going to keep it a secret until tonight," even that "fact" is dubious, as Stanley denies that it is his birthday: "This isn't my birthday, Meg" (48), telling Goldberg and McCann: "Anyway, this isn't my birthday. [...] No, it's not until next month," adding, in response to McCann's saying "Not according to the lady [Meg]," "Her? She's crazy. Round the bend" (53).

Although Meg claims that her house is a "boarding house," her husband, Petey, who was confronted by "two men" who "wanted to know if we could put them up for a couple of nights" is surprised that Meg already has "got a room ready" (23), and, Stanley (being the only supposed boarder), also responds to what appears to him to be the sudden appearance of Goldberg and McCann as prospective guests on a supposed "short holiday," flat out denies that it is a boarding house: "This is a ridiculous house to pick on. [...] Because it's not a boarding house. It never was" (53).

McCann claims to have no knowledge of Stanley or Maidenhead when Stanley asks him "Ever been anywhere near Maidenhead? [...] There's a Fuller's teashop. I used to have my tea there. [...] and a Boots Library. I seem to connect you with the High Street. [...] A charming town, don't you think? [...] A quiet, thriving community. I was born and brought up there. I lived well away from the main road" (51); yet Goldberg later names both businesses that Stanley used to frequent connecting Goldberg and possibly also McCann to Maidenhead: "A little Austin, tea in Fuller's a library book from Boots, and I'm satisfied" (70). Of course, both Stanley and Goldberg could just be inventing these apparent "reminiscences" as they both appear to have invented other details about their lives earlier, and here Goldberg could conveniently be lifting details from Stanley's earlier own mention of them, which he has heard; as Merritt observes, the factual basis for such apparent correspondences in the dialogue uttered by Pinter's characters remains ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations.[7][18]

Shifting identities (cf. "the theme of identity") makes the past ambiguous: Goldberg is called "Nat," but in his stories of the past he says that he was called "Simey" (73) and also "Benny" (92), and he refers to McCann as both "Dermot" (in talking to Petey [87]) and "Seamus" (in talking to McCann [93]). Given such contradictions, these characters' actual names and thus identities remain unclear. According to John Russell Brown (94), "Falsehoods are important for Pinter's dialogue, not least when they can be detected only by careful reference from one scene to another.... Some of the more blatant lies are so casually delivered that the audience is encouraged to look for more than is going to be disclosed. This is a part of Pinter's two-pronged tactic of awakening the audience's desire for verification and repeatedly disappointing this desire" (Brown 94).[18]

Although Stanley, just before the lights go out during the birthday party, "begins to strangle Meg (78), she has no memory of that the next morning, quite possibly because she had drunk too much and got tipsy (71–74); oblivious to the fact that Goldberg and McCann have removed Stanley from the house – Petey keeps that information from her when she inquires, "Is he still in bed?" by answering "Yes, he's ... still asleep"––she ends the play focusing on herself and romanticising her role in the party, "I was the belle of the ball. [...] I know I was” (102). For some, Petey’s final reply only makes dramatic sense if the framework of the whole play is in Meg’s mind, that her invention of Stan was ’necessary’ in an empty marriage, and what the audience has seen was a tragic ‘possible’ - no doubt to be followed by another narrative when her Stan ‘comes down’.[citation needed]

While on tour with L. du Garde's A Horse! A Horse!, Pinter found himself in Eastbourne without a place to stay. He met a stranger in a pub who said "I can take you to some digs but I wouldn't recommend them exactly," and then led Pinter to the house where he stayed. Pinter told his official biographer, Michael Billington,

I went to these digs and found, in short, a very big woman who was the landlady and a little man, the landlord. There was no one else there, apart from a solitary lodger, and the digs were really quite filthy ... I slept in the attic with this man I'd met in the pub ... we shared the attic and there was a sofa over my bed ... propped up so I was looking at this sofa from which hairs and dust fell continuously. And I said to the man, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "Oh well I used to be...I'm a pianist. I used to play in the concert-party here and I gave that up." ... The woman was really quite a voracious character, always tousled his head and tickled him and goosed him and wouldn't leave him alone at all. And when I asked him why he stayed, he said, "There's nowhere else to go."[19]

According to Billington, "The lonely lodger, the ravenous landlady, the quiescent husband: these figures, eventually to become Stanley, Meg, and Petey, sound like figures in a Donald McGill seaside postcard" (Harold Pinter 76).

Goldberg and McCann "represent not only the West's most autocratic religions, but its two most persecuted races" (Billington, Harold Pinter 80).
James goes by many names, sometimes Nat, but when talking about his past he mentions that he was called by the names "Simey" and also "Benny". He seems to idolise his Uncle Barney as he mentions him many times during the play. Goldberg is portrayed as a Jewish man which is reinforced by his typically Jewish name and his appropriate use of Yiddish words.
McCann is an unfrocked priest and has two names. Petey refers to him as Dermot but Goldberg calls him Seamus. The sarcasm in the following exchange evokes some distance in their relationship:

Stanley Webber — "a palpably Jewish name, incidentally — is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing, ... but once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation —'I've got to get things ready for the two gentlemen'—he's as dangerous as a cornered animal" (Billington, Harold Pinter 78).asaerutheen

According to Pinter's official biographer, Michael Billington, in Harold Pinter, echoing Pinter's own retrospective view of it, The Birthday Party is "a deeply political play about the individual's imperative need for resistance,"[citation needed] yet, according to Billington, though he "doubts whether this was conscious on Pinter's part," it is also "a private, obsessive work about time past; about some vanished world, either real or idealised, into which all but one of the characters readily escapes. ... From the very outset, the defining quality of a Pinter play is not so much fear and menace –– though they are undoubtedly present –– as a yearning for some lost Eden as a refuge from the uncertain, miasmic present" (82).

As quoted by Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Polish critic Grzegorz Sinko points out that in The Birthday Party "we see the destruction of the victim from the victim's own point of view:

"One feels like saying that the two executioners, Goldberg and McCann, stand for all the principles of the state and social conformism. Goldberg refers to his 'job' in a typically Kafka-esque official language which deprives the crimes of all sense and reality." ... [Of Stanley's removal, Sinko adds:] "Maybe Stanley will meet his death there or maybe he will only receive a conformist brainwashing after which he is promised ... many other gifts of civilization...."[20]

In the original interview first published in The New York Times, on 30 December 1988, Gussow quotes Pinter as stating: "The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I've ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, 'Stan, don't let them tell you what to do.' I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now."[21]

In responding to Gussow's question, Pinter refers to all three plays when he replies: "It's the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what the United States is doing to Nicaragua. It's a horrifying act. If you see child abuse, you recognize it and you're horrified. If you do it yourself, you apparently don't know what you're doing."[22]

As Bob Bows observes in his review of the 2008 Germinal Stage Denver production, whereas at first " 'The Birthday Party' appears to be a straightforward story of a former working pianist now holed up in a decrepit boarding house," in this play as in his other plays, "behind the surface symbolism ... in the silence between the characters and their words, Pinter opens the door to another world, cogent and familiar: the part we hide from ourselves"; ultimately, "Whether we take Goldberg and McCann to be the devil and his agent or simply their earthly emissaries, the puppeteers of the church-state apparatus, or some variation thereof, Pinter's metaphor of a bizarre party bookended by birth and death is a compelling take on this blink-of-an-eye we call life."[23]

^ ab"The Birthday Party", Socialist Worker, Socialist Worker, 10 May 2008, Web, 9 May 2008: "[The Birthday Party] centres around Stanley Webber, a mysterious man who claims to be a piano player. ... He is visited in the boarding house he now lives in by two sinister characters, Goldberg and McCann, who are looking for a "certain person". ... A birthday party for Stanley turns into a terrible experience. ...
The play received poor reviews when it first opened, but today The Birthday Party is rightly recognised as a classic."

^ abcdeMichael Billington, "Fighting Talk", The Guardian, guardian.co.uk, 3 May 2008, Web, 10 June 2008: "This month [May] The Birthday Party returns to the same theatre where it opened exactly 50 years ago. Slated by the critics, it nearly ended Harold Pinter's career. So how did it go on to become such a classic, asks Michael Billington." "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 16 April 2015. Retrieved 11 April 2015.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)

^Michael Billington, Harold Pinter, rev. and expanded ed. of The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996; London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 76. (Subsequent parenthetical references to this edition appear in the text.)

^This interview was first published in Mel Gussow, "Pinter's Plays Following Him out of Enigma and into Politics", The New York Times, 30 December 1988: C17, as cited in Susan Hollis Merritt, "Pinter and Politics," in chap. 8, "Cultural Politics" of Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995) 179. [Petey's line is one of two epigraphs for Pinter in Play; the other is Goldberg's line relating to the theme of social conformity discussed in criticism of the play by Sinko [as cited by Hinchliffe] and others: "Play up, play up, and play the game" (Cf.The Birthday Party in The Essential Pinter 92).] Pinter's comment on Petey's line from Gussow's 30 December 1988 New York Times interview with Pinter is also cited by Gussow in his "Introduction" to Conversations with Pinter, which refers to the edited version of the interview as reprinted in the "December 1988" section of the collection entitled "'Stan, don't let them tell you what to do'" (65–79): "In conversation in 1988, Harold Pinter said that he lived that line all his life. That stubborn individuality has been a chief motivating factor for the playwright, whether he was rejecting his call up for national service as a young man, or, later in his life, reacting to censors, dismissive critics or nations undermining human rights. In the broadest sense, Pinter has always been a conscientious objector, even as people keep trying to tell him what to do" (9).

^Susan Hollis Merritt, "The Birthday Party: CSC Repertory Theatre, New York, 17 April 1988, 12 Apr. 1988—22 May 1988", Pinter Rev. 2 (1988): 66–70 and "A Conversation with Carey Perloff, Bill Moor, Peter Riegert, Jean Stapleton, and David Strathairn: After matinée of Mountain Language and The Birthday Party[,] By CSC Repertory Ltd.[,] Bruno's, New York, 12 Nov. 1989", The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1989, ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale (Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1989) 59–84. Both productions starred David Strathairn as Stanley. The 1989 CSC production substituted Jean Stapleton for Georgine Hall as Meg and Bill Moor for Robert Gerringer as Petey; in both productions Peter Riegert played Goldberg, Richard Riehle played McCann, and Wendy Makkena played Lulu. According to Merritt's recorded and transcribed "conversation" with the director and cast members, when Pinter attended rehearsals of the second production, he added Goldberg's line "What a lovely flight of stairs" (61–62). In his May 2008 BBC Radio 4 extended interview with Rebecca Jones, excerpted on Today on 12 May 2008, Pinter remembers having done so for a production in "1999", but, according to Perloff in the November 1989 interview with Merritt, he originated the line for her production, which featured a functional staircase prominently in its set and action; Perloff observes: "in every Pinter play, upstairs is threatening ..." (63).

Andrews, Jamie. "L'anniversaire". (The Birthday Party). Harold Pinter Archive Blog, British Library (BL), 3 March 2009. (Performance rev. of a French revival staged after Pinter's death written by the BL Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts, who is the custodian of Pinter's Archive.)